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| Mary MacKillop - Australia's First Saint - AFP Photo |
Mary MacKillop officially declared a saint - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
The photograph and following excerpt is from the Australian Boadcasting Corporation:
Mary MacKillop has officially been declared Australia's first Catholic saint - Saint Mary MacKillop of the Cross.
Pope Benedict XVI addressed over 50,000 pilgrims who gathered at the Vatican in Rome, of which about 9,000 were from Australia.
St Peter's Square was awash with Australian flags and gold balloons bearing Mary MacKillop's image, as pilgrims packed in to hear the pope's vital words.
Pope Benedict spoke about the achievements of Mary MacKillop.
"She attended to the needs of each young person entrusted to her without regard for station or wills, providing both intellectual and spiritual formation," he said.
The pope also canonised Canada's Brother Andre and four other saints from Italy, Poland and Spain and declared that "throughout the Church they be honoured devoutly among all the saints."
Born in 1842 in Fitzroy, Melbourne, after her mother and father migrated to Australia from Scotland, Mary MacKillop dedicated her early life to educating poor children in regional Penola, South Australia, and at the age of 25 founded the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart.
She was the first Australian nun to set up an order and the first to go outside the cities and administer to the poor.
In the early 1990s the Vatican accepted she was responsible for miraculously curing a woman who had leukaemia in 1961 and in 2009 Pope Benedict XVI confirmed her second miracle, which involved the healing of a woman with inoperable lung cancer during the mid-1990s.
Read More: Mary MacKillop Officially Declared a Saint
